X Wing - Painting Red 5

FFG's new game, X Wing has some great pre-painted miniatures. While the paint job on the X Wing is good it represents a generic Red Squadron X Wing.

There may be other X Wings that look cooler but there is no denying that Luke's  Red 5, is the most famous X Wing of them all. As Star Wars purists know Luke Skywalker flew Red 5 in his attack on the Death Star.

Red 5 in the foreground

With minimum effort you can customize your X Wings and make them unique on the gaming table.
I will explain step by step this simple painting conversion.

For starters I needed an X Wing I didn't mind ruining if everything went south on me.

One Sacrificial X Wing... check!

 I would also need some reference pictures of Red 5. my Blue Ray was the first stop but I also had some good painting guides on hand.

Perfect, now with reference material handy I could start my project. First step is to paint the yellow stripe along the top of the nose.

For this line I used some Tamiya masking tape. Good stuff for modelling!

Once masked I used GW Vomit brown highlighted with yellow.

There we go... already looking more Luke-y!

Next up was to clean up some of the excessive dark wash and mask out the gaps in the red stripes along the hull. This would require me to match the base coat of the X Wing... this would turn out to be the longest step in the whole project.

Fear not though! for I found a mix that was close enough and I will share it with you now!

Vallejo Deck Tan and Khaki. Mixed in equal parts was just about perfect.

I used the color to fill in the Red I no longer wanted and to cover a lot of excess black wash. I also used it to thin the Red wing markings as I would need a little extra room to add the 5 red dashes that make the X Wing Red 5. Clever how that works, huh?

Next I went in with the red. This was the most fiddly part... adding the Red dashed on the wing.

to match the red of the Dashed I brightened up the pre-painted red by covering it with a thin coat of GW Blood Red.

With the Red added I then went back with the base coat color and added a few scratched to the Red paint.

Next up was to tackle R2-D2... The pre-paint droid is just silver, so some Ultramarine blue will fix it up nicely.

Nothing too fancy, just a few lines and dots of blue and the illusion is complete!

Next was the blue "Candy Can" stripes on two of the 4 laser cannons.

Lastly I put a coat over Future floor wax over the black canopy to make it even shinier.

Total time was a little over an hour but I think she turned out well. I'm now ready to make the Trench Run in style. Next up will be custom paints for Reds 1, 2, and 3 as well as a Blue Squadron X Wing.

Here is Red 5 in formation with a standard pre-painted X Wing

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I'd love to hear from anyone who has customized their own ships for X Wing!

Enjoy!